News about "Learning CFEngine 3"

Third Release of 'Learning CFEngine 3' Is Out!

Oct 21st, 2013

I am delighted to announce that, after many months of work, the Third
Release of Learning CFEngine 3 has been
released! You can get it
directly from O’Reilly
(affiliate link) or from any other of the usual places. If you
previously purchased the ebook version, you should see the update
already in your “Your products” page at
oreilly.com, with options to download it or
sync it to Dropbox, Google Drive or Kindle.

There are many changes throughout, but here is a brief summary of the
most important ones:

The book has been thoroughly updated for CFEngine 3.5.2. This
includes many new features, such as the new edit_template
mechanism, improved services: promises, lots of new functions, and
many others.

The brand-new Chapter 5 provides an overview of the CFEngine Design
Center. The Design Center had been mentioned in previous releases,
but now is a mature and capable resource including powerful tools
that allow you to use CFEngine in a completely new way, using
entirely data-driven configuration. This chapter will get you
started with the Design Center, and also provide pointers for you to
explore on your own and even to contribute to it!

Several new sections have been added, including “Dynamic Loading and
Execution”, “Using Vagrant with CFEngine”, “Service Management Using
CFEngine”, and others.

The brand-new Appendix C, contributed by
Aleksey Tsalolikhin, contains a
summary of all the attributes available for promises in agent
bundles. Just browsing through this Appendix will give you an
excellent overview of all the things you can do with CFEngine. In
the electronic version of this book, each attribute links to its
reference documentation in the CFEngine website, so you can look up
the full details in seconds.

Fixes to all known errata, typos, failures of clarity, and numerous
other things.

In addition, many of the examples have been updated or improved,
additional emphasis has been placed on how to integrate your policies
into a running CFEngine installation, and numerous other improvements
have been made. All while maintaining the clarity, practicality and
usefulness you have come to expect from this book. As usual, in the
electronic versions, you will find that CFEngine keywords and concepts
are links to the corresponding sections of the documentation.

I would like to thank YOU for reading the book, and for providing me
with so many useful ideas, suggestions and corrections through the
O’Reilly errata page, the CFEngine mailing list, IRC channel, and
directly by email. Your feedback has made this new release possible
and many times better. THANK YOU! (and please keep it coming)

I’m extremely happy to bring you this release, and I’m confident you
will be happy with it as well. Please check it out!